[147]
Margites, Fr.
1
Soc.
Hence the state or soul that is to live aright must hold fast to this knowledge, exactly as a sick man does to a doctor, or as he who would voyage safely does to a pilot. For without this, 147a the more briskly it is wafted by fortune either to the acquisition of wealth or to bodily strength or aught else of the sort, the greater will be the mistakes in which these things, it would seem, must needs involve it. And he who has acquired the so-called mastery of learning and arts, but is destitute of this knowledge and impelled by this or that one among those others, is sure to meet with much rough weather, as he truly deserves; since, I imagine, he must continue without a pilot on the high seas, and has only the brief span of his life in which to run his course. 147b So that his case aptly fits the saying of the poet, in which he complains of somebody or other thatFull many crafts he knew: but still
He knew them all so very ill.
Alc.
Why, how on earth is the poet’s saying apposite, Socrates? For to my mind it has nothing to do with the point.Soc.
It is very much to the point: but he, good sir, like almost every other poet, speaks in riddles. For poetry as a whole is by nature 147c inclined to riddling, and it is not every man who can apprehend it. And furthermore, besides having this natural tendency, when it gets hold of a grudging person who wishes not to show forth to us his own wisdom but to conceal it as much as possible, we find it an extraordinarily difficult matter to make out whatever this or that one of them may mean. For surely you do not suppose that Homer, divinest and wisest of poets, did not know it was impossible to know ill; for it is he who says of Margites that he knew many things, 147d but knew them all ill: but it is a riddle, I think, in which he has made ill stand for evil, and knew for to know. So if we put it together, letting the meter go, indeed, but grasping his meaning, we get this: Full many crafts he knew, but it was evil for him to know them all. 2 Then clearly, if it was evil for him to know many things, he was in fact a paltry fellow, assuming we are to believe what we have previously argued.Alc.
But I think we may, Socrates: at least, if I cannot believe those arguments of ours, I shall find it hard to trust any others.Soc.
And you are right in so thinking.Alc.
I repeat that I think so.Alcibiades 2. Plato. Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1927.
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